City of Masks

46

Deirdre's house was chaos. The girls had hatched a scheme and had answered a flyer they'd spotted on a neighborhood telephone pole. The dog they'd come home with was a small, scruffy, miniature terrier mix, no puppy but a middle-aged dog they were calling Arthur for the time being. Now he skittered and biffed around the living room, kicking up throw rugs and terrorizing the cats, who watched him with loathing from the top of the piano.

"Tell me the other half of the plan," Cree insisted. Deirdre rolled her eyes.

Zoe took the lead: "It's the only way, Aunt Cree. If you don't want to do it, leave it to Hy and me. Who'd suspect two innocent kids of a scam like this? We go to where that old woman lives, right? And we give her Arthur somehow."

"Somehow like how?"

"That's kind of the hard part," Hyacinth told her. "Maybe we wait until she goes shopping and then we casually come up and ask her if she'd mind holding his leash for a minute while we go into a store or something. And then we never come back."

"Or maybe we just tie him to the fence in front of her house, and she sees him there and after a while figures he's been abandoned. And she'll take him in."

"Or we go up to her and say, like, 'Excuse me, ma'am, our dog is just drawn to you, like he knows you or something. Gee, it's almost supernatural, the way he keeps pulling us back over here. It's like he belongs with you – maybe you better take him.' Something like that."

Cree nodded doubtfully, trying to picture Mrs. Wilson's reaction.

"Well," Deirdre told them, "we're going to have to do something with him. He's a charming little guy, but he's awfully macho, and he's not meshing with the cats. He's also very set in his ways – he's a fussy eater, and he insists on sleeping only on the couch or on our bed. Don and I shoo him off, but – "

The dog yapped piercingly at the cats, who didn't move except to tick their ears back a notch. To distract him, Zoe began teasing him with a chewed-up leather belt, making him run in circles.

Deirdre gave Cree an accusing glare: You got me into this, you get me out.

"It's a terrific plan. We'll figure out something," Cree said. Actually, she thought, depending on the details, it might just work. And the habits that made Arthur less than appealing for Deirdre would probably be the very ones that melted Mrs. Wilson's heart.

" 'Innocent' kids?" Cree asked.

"Well, Hy is," Zoe clarified. "And I'm innocent looking."

Deirdre clapped her hands to get things moving toward the door; they were running late. Cree had just stopped to pick them up and had already distributed the beads, voodoo dolls, alligator teeth, and hot sauces she'd brought from New Orleans. The plan was to meet Mom at the gym, take her out to dinner. It was something of a ritual: Whenever she came back from a ghost-hunting trip, she needed to reconnect, nestle up against the family, touch every base, reaffirm every contact. She was trying to remember where she was in life, who she was. This time it was particularly hard. She had to reclaim herself.

Not everything, though, Cree reminded herself. Some things were best left behind.

There was no league play tonight, which meant that Janet could leave her assistant to oversee the casual hoop shooters or pickup game. While she did a few last-minute errands in the building, Zoe and Hyacinth shed their street shoes and skated out into the yellow floor. They found a ball and began tossing it around. Cree and Deirdre watched them from the sidelines. Zoe had more zip on the boards, but Hyacinth had a better eye for shooting.

"This was a tough one, huh?" Deirdre asked quietly.

"It shows?"

"Let's see. You called me three times, usually at around midnight. You're ten pounds skinnier. Finger's in a splint." Deirdre eyes narrowed as she appraised Cree's face. "Bruises and scratches. Eyes are different."

"I'm good, Dee. I learned a lot." She returned Deirdre's close scrutiny, afraid for just an instant. You had to check each connection when you came back, see if it was the same, or if maybe the way you'd been changed had put your loved ones out of reach. But no, she saw with relief, not with Dee. Not this time. "It put me through some changes," she admitted, "but a lot of them are really good. Things I've needed to look at for a long time."

Deirdre nodded skeptically. "Well, you'd better have some believable and reassuring explanation for Mom. She'll worry. And she's got enough to worry about right now."

It was eight days until her procedure, and Deirdre was getting nervous.

Zoe got a basket and aped the prancing, self-congratulatory dance the professionals did, hand over head, limp wrist, chest convulsing. "Sha- quille O-Neeeal!" she cheered.

Janet appeared at the back of the gym, pulling a windbreaker over her uniform shirt. She caught a pass from Hy, dribbled, and flipped it to Zoe. They came across the floor like that, triangulating.

"Okay. I'm a free woman," Janet told them. She bowled the ball back into the gym. "Lordy, it's so nice to see all my girls! How are you, Creester?" Her voice was cheerful, but her eyes looked old and concerned. Behind her, Dee gave Cree a glare.

"I'm great. I'm better than I've been in a long time." Cree hoped she heard the truth in that. "New Orleans was terrific. I ate a lot of great food, and I got drunk on Bourbon Street, Mom. I didn't whore my way down the other side, though." She grinned.

"What's that about?" Deirdre asked.

"Later," Janet commanded. Zoe and Hyacinth walked ahead of them and gave no indication they'd heard. "And, what, you got into a catfight with some drag queen? Good God, Cree!" She meant the splinted finger and fading bruises.

They came through the double front doors. The girls skipped down the steps ahead of them. Deirdre and Janet kept an expectant silence.

"I met a guy," Cree blurted, surprising herself. It was the only easy explanation or excuse she could come up with. Inwardly, she corrected herself: Met him and unmet him. And he turned out to be a bastard. But it was a truthful explanation for many of the changes, and truly they were not all injurious. Too bad it ended with Paul's deception. Just one of many in the city of masks.

The twins stopped dead, their pretense of obliviousness dropped.

Janet just snorted. "What, and that's supposed to make us feel better? Who is this bruiser?" She kept the facade of disapproval, but Cree knew she was just playing the role. Her curiosity had been aroused.

"Actually, he's a psychiatrist."

"Worse and worse," Janet growled.

Deirdre tugged their mother's arm. "C'mon, Mom. This isn't the McCarthy hearings, it's 'welcome home, Cree.' Cree will tell us about it if she wants to. We'll never get a table if we don't get going."

Cree tried to make Friday a regular day. She went to the office early, typed up some notes from the Beauforte investigation. Personal stuff aside, this had been an enormously instructive case, and she wanted to record her observations and impressions while they were still fresh. Also, Ed would be coming in later, and she wanted to be able to put it in some kind of order for the mutual debriefing they always conducted after doing solo work.

The thought of seeing Ed made her nervous.

At ten, Joyce came into Cree's office and they sat in the easy chairs facing the windows as they went through two weeks' worth of mail together.

One manila envelope bore a New Orleans postmark, and Cree opened it hurriedly to find that, as she'd hoped, it was from Deelie. The reporter's affectionate note was accompanied by several clippings of front-page articles she'd written about Channian's arrest and confessions. Apparently, scooping the story hadn't been too bad for Deelie's career: Her byline now included her photo and carried the tag, "award-winning investigative journalist." Just the sight of that good face brought a smile to Cree.

One letter informed Cree that a monograph she'd written had been accepted by a prestigious scholarly journal, and another turned out to be an invitation to speak at the University of New Mexico's "Horizons in Psychology" conference. Very gratifying, a nice welcome home.

Several promising inquiries had come in, too. In Wyoming, a group of ranchers had asked VKA to look into persistent hauntings in a ghost town. In Nauvoo, Illinois, a Methodist minister solicited their perspective on what he believed might be ghosts of Mormons killed there during the persecutions in 1845; all over town, children were having dreams of hangings and burning men. In New York City, a police investigator wanted help with an unexplained seepage in the apartment of an unnamed celebrity; the fluid tested as human blood, but when they'd taken down the stained ceiling they'd found no source for it, and as soon as they'd rebuilt the ceiling, the seep returned.

In other words, the world went on as it always had, its seen and unseen dimensions maintaining their uneasy coexistence.

Sunlight came and went as an endless flotilla of little clouds moved across the sky: The Sound and the Olympics were dappled with cloud shadows that slid down the near slopes and skated across the blue-green water. The Emerald City, Cree reflected. It was good to be back.

They'd been going over the finances for half an hour before Cree really noticed Joyce's excess of professionalism. She was dressed in a snappy pants suit and was being businesslike to the point of brusqueness, and though Joyce could be very efficient this wasn't like her.

Cree put down her pencil. "Joyce. What?"

Joyce looked caught out. "Nothing. What do you mean?"

"What'd I do now?"

Joyce let her shoulders slump. She stared longingly out the windows as if wishing she could escape to the open spaces. "You asked me. So don't blame me when I tell you, okay? The same thing I've been saying, Cree."

"We've been over this!" Cree moaned. Joyce had been in Cree's room when Paul had called the hotel, the day before they left. When Cree had refused to speak to him.

"Yeah. Let's see… first you couldn't be with him because of the Mike thing. Then you told him about Mike, and he understood, and it was good for you to get it off your chest. Okay, so then you couldn't be with him because he didn't believe in ghosts and thought you were nuts because you did. But then he had a doozie of a convincing experience at the crypt, and he's a believer now. So what's the latest excuse?"

"He was a… double agent, Joyce! A hypocrite, a… a liar! The whole time, he was spying on my investigation and talking to Charmian! He nearly got Josephine and me killed! Jesus, he – "

"Stop. Cree, you wouldn't listen to him when he tried to explain! You told him to shut up. But after you hung up on him, he called me in my room and explained everything. Look at it from his perspective. He's recruited by old friends of his family to help Lila. He's a highly regarded psychiatrist in New Orleans, he stands by old family loyalties, so he says, 'Sure.'"

"He knew everything right from the start! He could have – "

"He didn't know anything except he's got a patient who thinks she's seen a ghost! He starts therapy, but before he gets very far, this ghost buster comes to town and starts shaking things up." Cree started to speak, but Joyce raised a hand to cut her off, eyes savage. "Before long, you find Lila bashing around the house, and he's very concerned – she's at risk, he may need to have the family's cooperation to get her into appropriate treatment. Naturally, he talks to Charmian – "

"He had no business talking to Charmian, to anyone outside the confidential relationship with his patient!"

"His patient was in crisis! He thought there was a good chance he'd need the family's help! Anyway, Cree, hey, talk about the pot calling the kettle black? You do it all the time! You're Cree Black, the mystic maverick shrink who has some special dispensation to take every kind of license with the therapeutic process, remember?" Joyce waited until Cree gave one small nod of contrition. "Charmian's realizing she underestimated you, you're onto something. She tells Paul his father once helped the family in a time of crisis and asks if he'd do the same. 'Of course,' he says. 'What sort of crisis?' 'Nothing that bears upon Lila's situation,' she assures him, 'but something that if it turns up in Cree Black's prying, it'll damage the family name. And that wouldn't be good for Lila, would it? Given how shaky she is?' 'No,' he agrees. All she asks is that he keep her generally informed of where your investigation is heading. He thinks that's not unreasonable."

"Bastard."

"He believed Charmian to be an upstanding community member, as her husband had been. Anyway, however screwed up her efforts may have been, she was trying to protect her daughter."

"He deliberately steered me toward Richard. He brought me over, had me look just at the Epicurus photos from 1969!"

"He thought that was the truth, Cree. Charmian had told him what you'd find if you looked in the 1969 files. He thought he was showing you the real story at last. Charmian set him up! Paul didn't know it, but it was her last line of defense – you were finding out everything. Suppose the ghosts revealed to Lila or you that Lila killed Richard? The only way to mitigate her guilt was if he had raped her, if he did deserve it. But Paul didn't know about Brad, or Richard's murder. He brought you to the archives because he really wanted your help to deal with what he believed was Lila's rape by her beloved father."

Joyce went on, methodically, logically, remorselessly. Cree was feeling her carefully nurtured, righteous anger unraveling, and it scared her. It had been sustaining her for a week.

"Joyce. The fact remains, he cut a deal with Charmian. They concocted these half-truths, they deceived Lila!"

Joyce gave her the dead eye. "Unlike you, of course. Who didn't cut a deal with Charmian. Who didn't agree to any half-truths to protect Lila."

Cree's resistance suddenly ran out of gas. She turned her own eyes to the window. Somehow she hadn't seen it quite that way. It really was simple, wasn't it? Joyce was right. Joyce was always right.

The problem with accepting any of it was that it left her with only one grievance with Paul: his terrifying, penetrating insight. The hard truths he'd told her about Mike. And she couldn't think of a good excuse to flee that.

Joyce knew she'd scored a direct hit and was smart enough to know when to leave it. She gathered her papers and went to the door.

"So what do you recommend I do about it?" Cree called softly."Given that it's a little too late."

"No way, Cree. No more advice to the lovelorn, it's not in my job description. You're the one with ESP or whatever it is, you figure it out."

Ed got into the office around noon. Cree heard him bumping through the outer office door with his equipment cases, heard him greet Joyce, heard the big kiss he gave her even through the partially closed door. Cree decided she needed one of those, too.

They hugged in the outer office, a solid, thorough hug, as Joyce busied herself with paperwork. The familiar length of his body felt good against her, but the kiss felt rather measured, deliberately administered. She realized she had been worried about him. They made small talk as she helped carry some of the cases back into his office, then helped him put things back on the shelves.

Ed had thrown himself slouching into his desk chair. He was looking around his big room, looking vaguely dissatisfied and drumrning his fingers on the desk. "You want to take a walk? I haven't eaten lunch. We could take a stroll and then find a bite."

"You don't want to debrief?"

He hesitated. "Sure. Yeah. But let's do it as we walk."

They turned south on First Avenue, ambling toward Pioneer Square. The weather was cool and changeable, and at cross streets where the long views broke through, they could see the clouds roiling in from the west, sending shadows down the piebald slopes of the mountains. After a few blocks they turned downhill toward Alaskan Way, with the assumption they'd talk for a while and then grab lunch at Pike Place Market. They hadn't even discussed it, but of course Ed would know Cree needed the ambience of flux: The energy and flow made a safe haven for an empath. Both were new enough to Seattle to enjoy the bustle and color of the market's stalls, the endless variety of fresh fish and fruit and vegetables and breads, displayed so beautifully and temptingly.

Cree told him about her last days in New Orleans. They agreed that Richard's ghost had had a very typical double aspect – his memory of the beating, and of Lila in the swing, had been clearly linked with his experience of the moments of dying. But Bradford's doubleness was a different matter. The boar-headed phantom had been a remote generation. Its lack of an apparent link to its origin as a memory of a dying man, coupled with its high degree of independence, troubled them both.

Cree talked about the red herrings she'd considered: the idea of Richard as a multiple personality, and Joyce's all-too-plausible idea of a specter generated by a living person. Though those hadn't proved true, the boar-headed man still gave them a whole new category of manifestation to fit into their respective schemes of things.

Of course, the remote generation idea was only one of many troubling aspects of Bradford's second ghost. His solidity was one of them: Cree lifted her shirt to show Ed the faintly lingering scratches his hand had made on her stomach. In some ways more disturbing was his adaptability: He could perceive and interact with living beings in the current time.

Both features were as frightening for the fieldworking ghost hunter as they were challenging for the paranormal theorist. Together, these two aspects of the boar-headed man affirmed what many witnesses and parapsychologists had long claimed: that ghosts were capable of inflicting more than psychological injury upon a living person, and that ghosts could pursue something like an intentional, interactive agenda with the living, adapting to circumstances. It gave strength to the premise of folk legends all over the world, that ghosts sometimes pursued vendettas on those who had wronged them.

As they continued along Alaskan Way, Ed began to look increasingly troubled. Part of his dismay, Cree knew, was his concern for her, knowing that ghosts could hurt or kill a ghost hunter. The other part was theoretical. His lovingly constructed geomagnetic theory, now buttressed by the tidal-cycle evidence he'd brought back from Gloucester, might explain very limited perseverations, but it would never explain the phenomenon of the boar-headed man.

Nor, she knew, of Mike, that day in Philly.

"So," Ed asked, "how did she come out of it? Lila."

"She wouldn't tell me much about how it went with her father's ghost. She was exhausted. But she definitely emerged much stronger. She'd always had a core of strength, really, it was just a matter of putting her parts together, you know? She's a very different woman now. There's a calm in her now. A resolve. Hard to describe."

"Weren't you worried she'd learn the truth when she met him – that she'd killed him?"

"A little. But Richard was mainly an… emotional ghost. He was as affectively powerful as he was physically insubstantial. Remember, he didn't know who had poisoned him. And he never really thought about it as he was dying, he just wanted his kids to be all right. I was less worried that he'd reveal something than that her memories would spontaneously awaken from being around him. But it didn't happen. No, if Ron or Charmian don't tell her, I'm pretty sure she'll never know. And her psychiatrist is in on the deception, so I doubt he'll dig it up if she keeps working with him."

Ed's brow remained wrinkled.

"What else?" she prodded.

He shook his head, looking depressed and worn. "We go out on these expeditions wanting to figure out how the world works. We're trying to map this hidden terrain. We make terrific progress every time. And yet every time we come back, we have more questions than we have answers. We have new phenomena we can't integrate. Logic fails us. Our categories and taxonomies and theories all fall apart. When are going to know something, Cree?"

"Dunno," she admitted. She squeezed his hand.

"Speaking of which, what ever happened with that 'episode' of yours? The Civil War daydream?"

"Joyce and I checked it out. The house I saw across the gardens was definitely there, as I saw it, in 1862 – it's on all the plot maps of the period, and we even found a portrait of it the owners'd had painted. The original house burned down in 1954, but the family rebuilt and still lives there. Another old New Orleans family, the Millards. I even found their family crypt, not far from the Lamberts'. The names of the kids of that generation are all on it. Elizabeth – I thought of her as Lizzie – and Jane. The youngest was a boy named William John, who would have been six in 1862. Just as I saw him."

"Oh, man," Ed groaned.

"We checked the old Beauforte House site plans, too. They show the old cistern, right behind the kitchen garden. Just where I saw the soldiers drinking."

Ed was making such hyperbolic expressions of overwhelmedness that she had to laugh: His knees went wobbly and he staggered all over the sidewalk, clutching his chest as if having a heart attack.

"I think we even figured out whose mind I was seeing it through, Ed! General Beauforte had one daughter still living at home in May of 1862. Her name was Claudette, and she was fifteen when the Union Army took over the house. I was seeing it through her eyes as she waited in the slave quarters for them to take her and her mother away. It would have been a powerful moment. The experience lived on and I… I found it. I relived it."

Ed was looking around with theatrical paranoia. "Don't tell anyone!" he whispered. "We'll lose all our credibility. Or the CIA or somebody will kidnap you and make you do remote past viewing or something. Goddamn you, Cree! So help me, I'm going to catch up to you. I'm going to give you something that throws your theories into a tailspin. So help me."

She came to his side, put her arm around his waist; he did the same, and they walked on with matched strides, hip to hip. "You know, it's not too early to get a Bloody Mary with lunch," she told him. "Take the edge off these outrageous slings and arrows. Celebrate us both getting home. God, it's nice to see you!"

"Cree." His tone killed the exuberance dead.

"Yeah?"

"Tell me about the psychiatrist. How he fits in."

Cree saw it all in his eyes. "Joyce," she managed, feeling betrayed."Joyce told you. That's why you didn't come to New Orleans."

Ed just blinked once.

She was at a loss. "He was… he and I worked on Lila together. Compared notes. He doesn't 'fit in.' He and I, we – "

"What's this? What're we doing?" He gestured at the two of them, the street, the sky. He meant the good feeling that came so easily with them."This is nice, isn't it?"

"Of course! It's lovely! It's – " But Ed was walking on, and she had to jog to keep up with his long strides. She took his arm to slow him down, but he didn't look at her.

"So what's wrong with this?" he insisted. This time he sort of meant me.

Nothing! she almost said. This is as good as it gets! But her heart seemed to cleave inside her as she knew it wasn't quite so. "I don't know, Ed," she said.

They walked on for another minute, silent, not looking at each other, side by side but utterly distant.

"You should probably try to figure it out, Cree," he said at last. "Do what you have to. You know? We all gotta do what we gotta do. Let me know how it comes out."

He was offering some sort of permission, and she loved him fiercely for it. But when she tried to figure out what it was she had to do, no answer came. She clung to his arm, almost panicking, afraid he'd get away."Okay," she told him. "I'll try. Thanks."

They kept walking. They reached Waterfront Park, looked out at the water for a time. The Highway 99 overpass roared behind them as the Bainbridge Island ferry came in from the Sound, its hull banded in white froth. Excursion boats took off from the piers immediately to the south, and beyond them a couple of freighters hove slowly to the forest of gantries of the lower port. After a time they climbed the steps to Pike Place Market, got sandwiches, sat in one of the public seating stalls. They talked about other things. No Bloody Marys; the giddy sense of celebration was gone. Their conversation felt stiff, obstructed, but they forged along with determination. Ed said he'd heard about several other interesting cases in the Gloucester area: Various friends of the Wainwrights had heard about his prelim in their house and cautiously approached him with accounts of their own hauntings. It seemed everybody had some brush with the mysterious.

He said it reminded him again that, for all its weirdness, the world beyond vision was awfully close and immediate. Life – you really never knew what to expect, he said. What would come at you next.

Cree's heart felt as if it would break. Life was indeed strange, she agreed. She shook her head, feeling it: an ache.

Ed bit his lips and nodded his agreement.